Location

Progress

General

03/30/2012

At last count we have 3 WRT54G devices meshing using Brimstone's custom slim build.

strages purchased/obtained 8 TP-Link wr710N wireless routers, 3 of which have been flashed with openwrt.

strages purchased a fair sized clear blue water proof box and an 1800mAh battery pack that might work well for the wr710n's. Testing will ensue.

strages purchased a 45W solar array with power converter for use with the field day portion of this project.

strages purchased a 5W solar panel for use with the field day portion of this project.

07/09/2012

Stopped by Batteries+ and found 42Ah AGM battery for $76.99 and battery boxes for $12.99. The battery boxes should provide decent weather proofing so long as they're not submerged. Might want to paint them white so as to not absorb so much heat (they're black plastic). Still trying to workout a small footprint solar charging solution.

01/21/2013

Successfully configured an AP and adhoc(mesh) interface on 3 of the 8 routers and they all function properly! Mesh is mesh and AP let's everyone connect into the network over wireless. Still some configuration I have to setup for the physical LAN interfaces. Thanks to this website I now have a uci config that involves 2 line changes per device.

17:58 <+brimstone> but it's got batman, and wifi firmware, and it's small enough to flash

17:58 < strages_shop> works on Josh?

17:58 <+brimstone> yup

01/21/12

14:28 <+brimstone> strages_home: you didn't tell me these routers only had 8MB of ram too

14:35 < strages_home> I didn't know it was an issue :(

14:35 <+brimstone> yup

14:36 <+brimstone> i've got butterscotch in a weird state too

14:36 <+brimstone> boots up fine, then does something to corrupt itself

14:42 < strages_home> hmm

14:43 <+brimstone> i'm reflashing butterscotch with stock openwrt

14:43 <+brimstone> leaves him at least usable

14:44 < strages_home> kk

14:44 < strages_home> he's a 2.2 which means that's fine

14:44 <+brimstone> yeah, but my firmware should have worked

14:45 <+brimstone> so there's debugging that

14:45 < strages_home> oh you were testing it for use on all the devices, not just the 2MB ones

14:45 <+brimstone> yup

14:46 < strages_home> buterscotch is 4MB

14:46 <+brimstone> right

14:46 <+brimstone> why does the 1.7MB firmware fail?

14:46 < strages_home> not a clue

14:47 < strages_home> check lsmod and dmesg dumps for differences?

14:47 <+brimstone> probably the jffs2 stuff getting in the way

15:06 <+brimstone> yup, the jffs2 stuff

15:11 <+brimstone> pfft, batctl wants a debugfs

15:13 < strages_home> don't need it

15:38 <+brimstone> debugfs is so biiiiiiig

15:39 <+brimstone> +70k!

17:54 <+brimstone> Mesh: Built

01/23/12

[09:56] <strages_work> brimstone: is there a config being written somewhere on Josh that contrains all the settings for the mesh?

[09:56] <+brimstone> no, josh doesn't have room to save configs

[09:57] <+brimstone> but /etc/init.d/mesh-setup and /etc/init.d/mesh-finish are the static files i hard coded into the firmware to set it up

[09:57] <strages_work> ok

[09:59] <strages_work> I'm thinking we need to replicate those settings in a config file for the 4MB devices and just run straight openwrt 10.3.1 on them. This would let us use tools like batctl etc on at least some of the devices.

[10:01] <+brimstone> we could also just pull the batctl binary from the package and replace it on the 4MB ones

[10:01] <+brimstone> the stock firmware has a lot of extra baggage

[10:01] <+brimstone> ppp, luci, etc

[10:03] <strages_work> can hostap be installed like that as well?

[10:03] <+brimstone> yes

[10:04] <strages_work> ok

[10:06] <strages_work> so right now, we can install your openwrt image on all the devices (at least the ones we've tested thus far), they'll mesh, and we add packages as needed given room on the device?

[10:06] <+brimstone> should be able to

[10:06] <+brimstone> i made sure opkg was still on there

[10:07] <strages_work> alright because I'm shooting for as little setup time as possible given that it's supposed to be an emergency network

[10:08] <strages_work> there are a few spinoff ideas after I finish this one utilizing the same or similar setup

[10:09] <strages_work> like having them in client mode on one of the virtual aps and auto connection to open wireless networks effectively extending the range of existing infrastructure

[10:09] <strages_work> *auto connecting

[10:10] <+brimstone> that'll be gross if you're not careful

[10:10] <strages_work> right, it's just an idea

[10:10] <+brimstone> as long as you're only linking to one network it should be ok

[10:11] <strages_work> or use a decent routing protocol to prevent routing loops

Notes

"And as a reference point, it was found that a 55 AH SLA battery with a 45W amorphous solar panel under decidedly sub-optimal conditions can run a WRT54G indefinitely." [2]

With the custom 2MB openwrt-10.3.1 image that brimstone is developing, if there is no mesh IP defined it will assume 192.168.10.2 .

Multiple SSIDs cannot be done with the custom 2MB image, but can on the 4MB devices.

This is due to the limited number of packages available due to memory constraints.

To enter failsafe mode on the wr703n routers, hit the reset switch multiple times immediately upon plugging it in. The blue light will begin blinking rapidly if done correctly. You should now be able to set your ethernet IP to 192.168.1.233 and telnet to 192.168.1.1. Run the command mount_root to mount the root filesystem and edit files to restore connectivity.